Prisons profit by stopping family visits

“I KNOW that my son is moving and talking on the other side of the screen, but when the video freezes you have to start the conversation all over again,” one mother says. She is in Rhode Island; he is almost 2,000 miles away, in jail in Hays County, Texas. “The picture is grainy and I can never see how he really is,” she explains, “but these sessions mean a lot because I’m so far away.”

A new study by the Prison Policy Initiative finds that families with relatives in 511 lockups across America are in a similarly bleak situation. Some 386 jails—about 12% of the total—offer “video visits”. Peter Wagner, one of the study’s authors, calls the spread of these services “a scandal” that remains “totally off the radar”.

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The option of a video visit might be useful for loved ones who live far away, so long as in-person visits are also allowed. But many prisons offer screen time instead of face time, arguing that prisoners do not need the latter since they can have the former. What is more, kiosks for calls are in public spaces, meaning that inmates have to be careful what they say. And calls are costly: $29.95 for 20 minutes of talk in Wisconsin’s Racine County, for example. Securus, a large firm providing communications services to 2,200 lockups, typically charges a dollar a minute for a video call (see chart).

Five of the seven main companies that run video chats, including Securus, require a chunk of time to be bought in advance of a scheduled call—irritating if glitches ruin a session, as they often do. Before May 2014, when Clark County, Nevada revamped its Renovo video system, more than half of its average of 15,000 monthly video visits were cancelled after technical problems.

Most jails let relatives make a few free video calls if these are conducted within the prison itself. But travelling a long way, only to sit behind a computer screen, is time-consuming and frustrating. And in-person visits ought to be encouraged: just one can reduce the likelihood of an inmate reoffending by 13%, according to a study in 2011 by the Minnesota Department of Corrections. Incredibly, 74% of jails have banned visitors from seeing inmates after introducing video services. Securus has even demanded it. (The firm did not return requests for comment.)

Complications may arise from all this. Lawyers may claim that communicating with their clients only through video calls is a violation of due process, says Patrice Fulcher of John Marshall Law School. The possibility of recording such conversations could also lead to the leaking of privileged information. “This whole situation exploits people on the inside and their families on the outside,” Ms Fulcher says. “It’s like we’re serving the sentence with them,” says the mother from Rhode Island.

Darren Krieghauser, an executive at HomeWAV, a company which provides video services to 50 lockups, disagrees. He says inmates have managed to get married and see their newborn children using his company’s terminals. He stresses that the question of whether or not to allow in-person visits “is completely up to each individual jail”.

Often, though, officials prefer to stop them. First, they get nervous when prisoners leave their cells. Second, jails may receive a commission from the money made using off-site video calls (typically, 20% from Securus and 10% from JPay, another provider). However, sheriffs hoping to fill up county coffers this way may well be disappointed. Securus estimated that Hopkins County, Texas would scoop $455,597 over five years from its 70% cut of earnings from both video visits and phone calls. But in the 2014 fiscal year the county pulled in less than half of what it had expected. Often the cost of installing the video equipment has to be recovered first, meaning that some chokeys will see no cash from video calls for years to come.

The scandal has attracted scant attention from politicians. In theory, the Federal Communications Commission could cap the cost of video calls, but it is up to state lawmakers to insist that prisoners are allowed to meet their loved ones in the flesh.

Still, even as one part of the criminal-justice system profits from misery, another abuse may be abating slightly. On January 16th Eric Holder, the soon-to-retire attorney-general, said he would curb joint federal-state “civil forfeiture” actions. This is when the police seize houses, cars, money and other assets that they suspect are the proceeds of crime, without having to prove it. Cash from auctioning these assets often goes to pad police budgets and pay for new kit—a clear conflict of interest, civil libertarians complain. More than 15,000 such seizures occurred in 2010, generating $2.5 billion. Many states will continue to allow them, arguing that they are a useful tool for hobbling drug dealers. ….

Texans against the Nazis

Mario Ovalle reports from Rockwall, Texas, on an counter-protest mobilized to confront an anti-immigrant demonstration organized by neo-Nazis.

November 12, 2014

Texas anti-racists take a stand against the neo-Nazis

SOME 100 people mobilized to the town of Rockwall, Texas, northeast of Dallas, on November 8 to confront an anti-immigrant rally held by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM).

The NSM has its roots in a 1967 split from the American Nazi Party (ANP) following the murder of ANP founder and former Navy commander George Lincoln Rockwell. In recent years, the NSM has grown following the decline of the National Alliance and the Aryan Nations after the death of the organizations’ leaders in 2002 and 2004. The NSM is now the largest neo-Nazi organization in the U.S. according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, with its own presidential candidates and 61 chapters in 35 states. …

Jail Photo

Attempting to serve a search warrant by entering a house through a window got Killeen, Texas, Police Detective Charles Dinwiddie shot in the face and killed last May. It was yet another SWAT raid organized for a purpose other than the reason they were invented. The police had a search warrant looking for narcotics at the home of Marvin Louis Guy, 49. They decided to serve this warrant at 5:30 in the morning and without knocking on his door. He opened fire on them, killing Dinwiddie and injuring three others. …

An investigation into the Houston police department reveals why officers rarely face the consequences of beatings or shootings.

December 13, 2013 |

The following story first appeared in the Texas Observer.Check out their website for more great stories.

Sebastian Prevot watched helplessly as three police officers advanced on his wife. Prevot was handcuffed and bleeding in the back of a cop car. Half of his left ear dangled where it had been torn from his head. The Houston Police Department doesn’t deny that its officers gave Prevot these injuries during a late-night arrest in January 2012. The only dispute is whether he earned them.

Analysis: Wrongful convictions sharpen focus on death penalty

Michael Morton, center, flanked by his attorneys Jerry Goldstein, far left, and Barry Scheck, far right, smiles during a press conference after former Williamson County prosecutor and state district judge Ken Anderson reached a plea agreement to settle criminal and civil lawsuits for Anderson’s misconduct in the late-1980’s prosecution of Michael Morton during court held in Georgetown, Texas., on Nov. 8, 2013.(Photo: Rodolfo Gonzalez, AP)

For people wrongly convicted and sent to prison for crimes they did not commit, the opportunities for justice are few and far between.

“There have been no consequences for the prosecutor in my case,” said Anthony Graves, a Texas man who was exonerated three years ago after serving more than a decade on death row for a murder he did not commit.

“He’s never been in front of any board and is free to do whatever he wants, even though the court cited egregious misconduct in his handling of my case,” said Graves, who now advocates for criminal justice reform. Graves spoke Tuesday on a panel of experts at an American Bar Association conference in Atlanta. Earlier in the meeting, former President Jimmy Carter called on the lawyers’ association to campaign to end the death penalty.

In another case of misconduct mentioned by the panel, the prosecutor was disciplined. Texas prosecutor Ken Anderson deliberately withheld evidence proving that a Texas man, Michael Morton, did not murder his wife. He will serve 10 days in jail for contempt of court for withholding evidence and serve 500 hours of community service. He will also give up his law license. Morton served almost 25 years for the murder he did not commit. …

Anderson accepted the plea deal in the same Williamson County courthouse where he later spent 11 years as a state judge. He resigned in September. Photo: AP

A former Texas prosecutor who won a conviction that sent an innocent man to prison for nearly 25 years agreed Friday to serve 10 days in jail and complete 500 hours of community service.

Ken Anderson also agreed to be disbarred and was fined $500 as part of a sweeping deal that was expected to end all criminal and civil cases against the embattled ex-district attorney, who presided over a tough-on-crime Texas county for 30 years.

Anderson faced up to 10 years in prison if convicted of tampering with evidence in the 1987 murder trial of Michael Morton, who wrongly spent nearly 25 years in prison…..

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Several U.S. states are turning to lightly regulated pharmacies for lethal injection drugs, prompting a host of court battles and at least one stay of execution because of concern tainted or impure drugs could inflict cruel and unusual punishment on inmates.

The scramble for alternative supplies comes as major pharmaceutical companies, especially based in Europe, have clamped down on sales of drugs for executions in recent years in order to avoid association with the punishment.

Missouri on Friday abandoned a plan to use the anesthetic propofol to put an inmate to death after the German maker of the drug, Fresenius Kabi, discovered that some had been sold to the state for executions, and suspended shipments to a U.S. distributor in retaliation.

Cut off from traditional sources of drugs, at least five states where the death penalty is legal — South Dakota, Texas, Ohio, Georgia and Colorado — are looking to “compounding” pharmacies, which typically mix drugs for prescriptions and are mostly exempt from federal oversight and face widely varying scrutiny from states.

Tainted drugs from a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy caused an outbreak last year of a rare type of meningitis that killed more than 50 people and sickened more than 700 in 20 states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The resulting outcry has sparked a drive in Congress for a larger role by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has warned of “special risks” from compounding pharmacies.

No judge appears to have ruled that an execution was botched from compounded drugs. But death penalty opponents have filed a flurry of lawsuits seeking to halt executions using them.

“You don’t have a high level of assurance that the drug is pure and potent,” said Sarah Sellers, a pharmaceutical consultant who testified twice about the risks of compounders before the Massachusetts Legislature after the meningitis outbreak. “When used in executions, they are a real concern. It could take longer to die, there could be unnecessary suffering.”

Compounders and prison officials reject that view, saying the industry does good work, and that executions happen too fast for tainted drugs to mar the process.

A spokesman for the compounding industry, David Ball, said he was aware of only three pharmacies that had supplied compounded drugs for lethal injections, and that the industry in general was of “high quality.”

“No compounding pharmacy that I know of is actively seeking this business,” he said. “Every pharmacist that I know chose their profession in part out of a desire to help people, and that is what they focus on in their work.”

The results of the court challenges have so far been mixed. In their biggest success, a Georgia judge in July granted a stay of execution for death row inmate Warren Lee Hill. Among the reasons Fulton County Superior Court Judge Gail Tusan cited were questions whether Georgia’s lethal injection drug was “somehow contaminated or improperly compounded.” The state Supreme Court is considering the case.

Other judges have allowed executions to go ahead. In a case brought by three Texas death row inmates, among them Michael Yowell, challenging the use of the drug pentobarbital from a compounder, a judge said he was not persuaded.

“Pentobarbital will kill Yowell in five to eighteen minutes and his consciousness will be diminished almost immediately; therefore, infections like meningitis will not hurt him because they require weeks to incubate,” wrote U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes.

Yowell was executed on Wednesday, the first Texas inmate put to death using the compounded drug.

The FDA, which regulates drug manufacturers, does not approve the products of compounding pharmacies, which are licensed through state pharmacy boards.

An FDA study found the potency of compounded drugs can vary widely from that listed on the label, and the agency has cited numerous cases of contamination from such operations.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on September 28 to give the FDA more authority over compounding pharmacies, although the measure is unlikely to become law soon because of the political gridlock in Washington over the budget, national debt and health reform.

In response to concerns about the quality of drugs, Texas had an independent laboratory, Eagle Analytical Services, test the state’s compounded pentobarbital used in executions and it was 98.8 percent pure, court documents in the death row inmates case showed.

“Thousands of individuals use compounded drugs each day,” said Jason Clark, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. “The quality and potency of the compounded pentobarbital will not differ from the pentobarbital that is manufactured by a pharmaceutical company.”

LIFTING SECRECY The scramble for new sources of execution drugs has been accompanied by an effort to shield the process from scrutiny, which advocates for death row prisoners find troubling.

“The lack of transparency around the form and source of the drugs puts our clients at an unjustified risk of being executed with drugs that either will not work as planned or will cause excruciating pain and suffering,” said Bryan Stull, a lawyer specializing in capital punishment for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Court challenges and media scrutiny have been more successful in prying information about the compounded drugs from state authorities than in delaying executions.

South Dakota had refused to identify where it got the drugs that it used to execute an inmate last year. A judge on September 30 ordered the state to turn over some information to him, although he said the identity of the compounding pharmacist need not be disclosed publicly.

Earlier this year, Colorado officials turned to compounding pharmacies to seek out sodium thiopental, a common execution drug until major drug companies two years ago refused to supply it. The information was disclosed in a letter sent by the Colorado corrections department to compounding pharmacies that became public in a lawsuit filed in May by the ACLU.

Ohio, which is running out of usable drugs for executions, announced on October 4 that it would allow the purchase of drugs from compounding pharmacies if needed.

Texas, which executes more inmates than any other state, stirred debate over whether it had promised secrecy to a supplier, when it identified the compounder earlier this month.

On October 2, in response to a media public information request, the state criminal justice department said it had purchased pentobarbital for executions from Houston-based Woodlands Compounding Pharmacy.

Two days later, the owner of the pharmacy sent a letter to Texas corrections officials saying he wanted the drugs back because the company had been subjected to public criticism.

“It was my belief that this information would be kept on the ‘down low’ and that it was unlikely that it would be discovered that my pharmacy provided these drugs,” owner Jasper Lovoi said in the letter, which was disclosed in documents as part of a federal lawsuit filed against the state by three death row inmates.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said it had purchased the drug legally and had no intention of returning it.